Your guide to the TV critics press tour

Former ABC president Jamie Tarses' always-tenuous job security made her a fixture of the press tour scrum in the late '90s.

As mentioned in today's column, I'm flying out to Los Angeles today for the semi-annual (most of the time) Television Critics Association press tour. This will be the first winter tour in a couple of years, as last January's event was canceled due to the Writers Guild of America strike.

If you've already read my traditional press tour primer (originally co-written with former Star-Ledger TV critic Matt Zoller Seitz, and updated over the years by me), you can skip the rest of the post and come back tonight or (if day one with PBS is really slow) tomorrow for my usual wall-to-wall tour coverage. I'll try not to let the tour get in the way of doing the usual episode-by-episode reviews of my favorite shows, but, as the primer makes clear, I'll be pretty busy and I'm only one man. I shall do my best. Long story not that short: Twice a year, TV critics and reporters from every significant publication in the greater United States and Canada swoop down on a single hotel in the greater L.A. area. For two weeks (two and a half to three in the summer edition), we're shuttled from room to room as we attend news conferences, one-on-one interviews, parties and other events featuring executives, producers and stars from every major network, broadcast and cable.

The networks are here because they get major bang for their buck, hawking their upcoming wares to as many as 200 reporters at one time, depending on the session. In their perfect world, we would march from session to session, ask softball questions and write puff pieces about how wonderful all their new shows will be. The reality is a lot more unpredictable; depending on a program's subject matter, the charisma and intelligence of panel participants and the press corp's mood and interest level, the tone of any given press conference ranges somewhere between a birthday party, a Friar's Club roast and the Watergate hearings.

The reporters are here because it's an all-access pass to TV Land (and MTV, HBO, NBC, etc.), an epic, democratic free-for-all where a writer from a small paper in Kansas can interview the cast of "Grey's Anatomy" right along with the major players. And even for those of us who can get many of the actors and behind-the-scenes people on the phone for interviews, there's no substitute for doing it in person. I've had five-minute conversations at press tour that were more enlightening and quotable than hour-long sessions over the phone.

Other areas of show business have more scaled-down versions of press tour, but none is as long or as wide-ranging. Movie junketeers fly in for a weekend, catch a flick or two, do a few hours of interviews, and fly home. (Many of them also travel on the movie studios' dime; TV critics have been paying their own way to press tour for the last few decades.) We're here for weeks on end, coming face to face with everyone from former presidents (usually when PBS is on the schedule) to puppeteers (also a PBS staple, come to think of it). We have to ask knowledgeable questions of the fifth co-star on "NCIS" and the chairman of NBC's cable divisions.

The presence of the network suits is one of the unique parts of press tour. Not many other businesses force their top executives to regularly stand in front of a room full of hostile reporters and explain their every blunder; at press tour, it's a ritual. Some love the scrutiny, some despise it. CBS head honcho Les Moonves used to turn his press conferences into grand performances; even after being promoted so high up on the company food chain that he didn't really need to mingle with the great critical unwashed, he still showed up for several years of press conferences, and even now stops by CBS' press tour parties to take questions from an adoring throng. Conversely, as soon as critics' punching bag Jeff Zucker got promoted out of the head of primetime entertainment job, he cut back his press tour presence to the bare minimum.

I've been attending press tours for a dozen years now, and while I have to pull long hours each time, I never get tired of going. There are too many fascinating people to talk to (including some of the other critics), too much news made, too many weird encounters with the famous and quasi-famous.

After this intro, the blog entries will be much shorter and quicker, but I wanted to get you up to speed on what the hell I'm talking about, including this glossary of the most common tour traditions. Feel free to refer to it if you come across an unexplained reference to The Scrum a few days from now:

The Press Conference: The staple of the tour. Each day features eight or more of them, ranging from 30-60 minutes. The cast and creators of a show are led onto a stage so brightly lit that they can't see anyone in the audience, and reporters fight for the microphone to ask questions -- some smart, some dumb, some inexplicable. ("Your sons, they're both boys?")

The Question That Will Not Die: Every tour, an early session sets the tone for all that's going to follow, as someone asks a question that will be repeated over and over again, from session to session. Sometimes, it's the same critic, doing prep work on a story (a couple of tours ago, someone was obviously soliciting quotes for a "Why critics are important" column); more often, it's a feeding frenzy, with critic after critic asking The Question or, when panelists refuse to answer it, trotting out variations of it. (A popular tour phrase: "If I could come at that from a slightly different angle...") The Question occasionally appears at more than one tour: "Why aren't there any minority actors on your shows?" is a perennial. And sometimes, The Question becomes an odd joke. Two summers ago, every critic was working on a "Are there too many serialized new dramas?" column (short answer: yes), but the first network to make an appearance was CBS, which only had two serial dramas on its schedule and was still known for done-in-one procedurals like "CSI" and "Without a Trace." Still, The Question had to be asked, and asked, and asked some more, and CBS president Nina Tassler was completely befuddled by the whole thing. At one point in the session -- possibly multiple points -- I believe the phrase "You're kidding, right?" was uttered.

The Filibuster: A phenomenon that usually pops up at press conferences for struggling networks executives, wherein the exec uses up a third to a half of the allotted time giving a speech about useless demographic trivia, a strategy designed both to trim the time for Q&A and bore the critics so much that they're too sleepy to ask the appropriate "Why do you still have your job?" type questions. (I expect a lot of this from the guys running NBC.)

The Transcript: Each press conference is transcribed by a pair of court stenographers to save the critics some time and trouble. Sometimes, transcripts can conveniently omit an embarrassing moment for the network in question, or they can introduce an embarrassing new moment on their own. (A transcript for an "SNL" press conference described Lorne Michaels as doing a Dr. Evil impression when he was just talking like himself.) In one of the oddest transcript-related moments of all time, a few years back a critic spotted Max "Wojo from Barney Miller" Gail working in the transcription room. (A few tours later, Gail turned up as a transcribee again, as co-star of ABC's short-lived "Sons & Daughters.")

The Scrum: For 5-15 minutes after each session, reporters surround one or more of the panelists to ask follow-up questions or parochial stuff they wouldn't feel comfortable asking in front of the group. ("How did growing up in Boise shape your acting?") Because the circumstances are more intimate, the answers tend to be much better, which is why many veteran reporters save their questions for the scrum, leaving plenty of dead air during the press conferences for the dumb stuff.

The more popular -- or newsworthy -- the figure, the bigger the scrum. Jamie Tarses, pictured above, was rumored to be on the verge of losing her job during most of her tour appearances, and so there would constantly be a throng of reporters around her, all hoping she'd just break down and admit that she was unhappy with the situation. (During one particularly contentious period, she tried to avoid the press altogether, and was chased by three intrepid trade reporters as she tried to speed-walk through the lobby.) Kiefer Sutherland rarely has a moment to breathe when he shows up, but is a good sport about it. James Gandolfini, press-shy under the best of circumstances, usually looked like he needed a shot of epinephrine by the time his scrums were done with.

The Scrum Evacuation: Sometimes when the press conference is over, the producers and writers will beat a hasty retreat through the backstage door rather than loiter onstage or come outside to take follow-ups. This is usually a sign that (1) the show is in trouble, (2) the network is terrified that the talent might say something unflattering about the network, or just plain dumb, (3) we have a star from another field (usually music or movies) who considers themselves above one-on-one contact (Diana Ross once stationed bodyguards in front of the stage to prevent a scrum) or (4) the network is blowing off the print and Internet reporters in order to get their people across the hotel in time to do pre-scheduled puff piece interviews with TV outlets like "ET," "Access Hollywood" and "CNN Showbiz Today," which attach themselves to press tour as remoras attach themselves to the underbellies of sharks.

The Working Lunch: While the critics pay to travel and stay at the tour hotel, the networks make breakfast, lunch and dinner available for free, mainly as a means of keeping every critic from fanning out to the restaurant of his or her choice and losing attendance for the sessions. Some meals are just meals, but lunch often includes a press conference in order to maximize a channel's time that day. Also, most lunch sessions are devoted to shows that the critics might be inclined to skip if there wasn't the promise of convenient nourishment attached.

In my proudest moment on the tour, I was trapped years ago at a Martha Stewart working lunch where the lunch was delayed more than an hour, first because Martha couldn't bother to show up on time, then because she insisted on doing a cookie-decorating demonstration before she released the waiters. Determined to bring an end to this tyranny, I took Martha up on her offer to show my cookie design off to the rest of the room: it read "FEED ME." Lunch was served inside three minutes.

The Non-Party Party: Press tour is a dawn till midnight affair, and every night ends with a "party" thrown by that day's network that, in theory, is designed to give the critics more informal access to the stars, producers and executives. Problem is, in order to get their top talent to come to the thing, the networks try to throw actual parties, complete with music so loud that it's all but impossible to conduct an interview. One year, a critic on the verge of retirement entered a WB party filled with interchangeably attractive 20-something actors all talking amongst themselves while the reporters who hadn't already left in disgust stood along the walls; the critic waded into the middle of the room, held up his notebook and loudly asked, "Does anyone here have a personality?"

The Celebrity Elevator Ride: The celebs are either staying in the tour hotel for a day or two, or they're being sent to all parts of the hotel to do TV interviews and photo shoots. Either way, odds are strong that a critic will find himself sharing an elevator with a famous person at least once a day, often to comical effect. One critic once spent her ride explaining her dislike of Sam Waterston to a colleague - until Waterston silently exited the elevator from behind them.

The Session That's Better Than The Show: What the name suggests. This usually happens with sitcoms, where the ad-libbed answers the actors give turn out to be far funnier than any scripted punchlines they deliver in their series.

The Rule of Jay: Named in honor of genial Tribune Media reporter Jay Bobbin, who fills two valuable public services at press conferences: 1)He is always able to come up with the perfect simple question at the start of a session to put the panelists at ease; and 2)When a show is so bad that no one can think of anything to ask the panelists, Jay is able to think of question after question to fill the dead air. Another critic once realized that, whenever Jay asks seven or more questions in a session, the show is doomed to fail, no exceptions. So when it becomes obvious that Jay is on a roll, the critics start keeping tallies to see whether a show will live or die by Jay's microphone, while some of the savvier publicists do everything in their power to end the session before Jay hits the magic number.